In order to ensure economical network operations, providers are concerned with the following trade-off: on the one hand, better Quality of Service corresponds to higher price, thereby increasing revenue. On the other hand, if the provider guarantees higher Quality of Service and is not willing to run a higher risk, he can only accept less traffic, thereby decreasing revenue. In order to properly evaluate this trade off, the provider attempts to manage operational risk associated with non-complying network service-level agreements.
In the prior art, operators employ simple traffic engineering to meet the QoS as specified in the SLAs. For example, sensitivity analysis is carried out to determine the likelihood of violating SLAs.
Therefore, what is needed is a systematic method to evaluate risk and return with respect to network service-level agreements that can be implemented on a computer in order to provide near real time assessments of performance, thus providing more accurate risk assessments and less uncertainty.